Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Douglas J. Wood’s press team recently contacted me about reviewing
his Samantha Harrison trilogy, so here we are. Published in 2014, the first
novel, Presidential Intentions, follows
the life of a fictional, moderate Republican presidential candidate Samantha
Harrison and her run for office in 2016. The text creates a candidate that, at
least at the time of composition, fills the post Obama niche as a member of the
political right that can unify America’s moderate force and a natural lurch to
the conservatism after Obama’s move to the left. While the political scene went
a drastically different direction, the novel still holds merit.

At times the text dazzles, creating a unique character with
an interesting vision of the world. Harrison is a strong, principled woman, a maverick
in the true sense, and Wood crafts her with precision. The plot plays into the
political machine, dabbling in the power brokers that create both low and high
level political candidates, it dances around the election process, and exposes
the deep seeds of political patriarchy. But the text focuses mostly on the candidate’s
past, eschewing the majority of her political campaign for President of the
United States outside of speech excerpts that start each chapter. Written with
short chapters that dart across Harrison’s history, Wood struggles to paint a
coherent vision for his novel. Was this book about a political insider and her
rise or her marriage or her relationships with criminals she persecuted or
running for president?

For a section of the book we enter covert terrorist operations,
glaze over torture, and then discuss the moral merits of abortion. While some
of the topics can be heavy handed, Wood does an admirable job of creating an
interesting woman and keeping the reader plunging through the text in an effort
to discover what will happen next. In doing so, he writes more of a prologue to
a deeper story, one the next two novels aim to tell. If you are looking for a
steady read and a dip into the world of politics, give the text a look.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Chris Lear’s iconic narrative, Running with the Buffaloes, follows the 1998 University
of Colorado Cross Country Team. Iconic may not lavish this text with enough
praise. Lear writes what one who follows and coaches running would call a
perfect text. Running, especially high school and college cross country teams,
creates a brotherhood. This bond seems odd to outsiders—something they just don’t
get, but distance runners bond together. Their sport offers the unique ability
to punish their bodies for long periods of time, but unlike football or
wrestling, the runners can hold a full conversation throughout their journey. A
two-hour run is a hard, taxing workout, but it is often done with a band of teammates
and with the baring of one’s soul.

That said, Lear follows the entire season for Colorado,
doing so with unfettered access. He details the difficulties of a team looking
to break onto the national stage and claim a national championship. Yet, this
is not a team stocked full of Mercedes Benz runners. Outside of a couple guys,
most of the runners are homegrown athletes without the championship pedigree of
the their top name competitors. Thus, this is a season where Coach Mark Wetmore
is forced to push his team to the limits in order to try to achieve both a team
and individual championship.

Lear expertly reports on each and every experience. Using his
background as a runner himself, he is able to display the hijinks, the
workouts, and the scattered path the leads a group of individuals from disparate
backgrounds to become a team. Injuries strike, misfortune sneaks in, and the
pages turn with a heightened, heartfelt tension that inspires one and all
alike.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Naomi Novik’s Empire of
Ivory picks up just after book three, Black
Powder War, concludes but holds the
urgency. This time the plight rests not in the war with France, but rather with
the illnesses of the English dragons. It seems that the cold Temeraire caught
on his way to China was in fact a mysterious disease that had swept across Britain
and in his absence has been decimating the dragon population. While many of
died, others cling to life. While the addition of the feral dragons has helped defend
the coast from invasion, with an increasingly zealous force of French dragons,
a cure must be found, at any cost. Thus, since Temeraire was cured by eating
strange foods concocted by his Chinese chaperons at the time, Laurence and he
take off for Africa to discern the source of the cure and recreate the cure.

Thus the journey begins. While Laurence fights with Riley
over allowing a black missionary aboard their ship, the novel heads down Novik’s
familiar paths. There will be a long wait, then a flurry of action. Scenes of despair—they
cannot seem to find the right mushroom, and then when they do they discover a
dangerous and growing civilization of African dragons hell-bent on punishing
the European interlopers for the slave trade. All of this comes to head as Temeraire
and Laurence must make a decision on whether the cure is theirs for the taking
or something that should fall into the hands of all dragons, both friend and
foe.